Dual Videocards, Dreams and Windows 7
Is there a plan to allow multiple-videocard systems to run animated wallpapers?
Saturday, March 21, 2009 by SovereignGFC | Discussion: Animated Wallpapers
I know I asked about this a long time ago in a very, very old thread that I'm not going to dredge up. But, the crux of the matter is that I have two videocards (9800GX2 in SLI mode and a 7900GTX). Dreams and DeskScapes worked fine on the 7900GTX (although they would stutter since the card is rather old). They also worked on the 9800GX2 in SLI mode, but not when the card "splits" itself since both DVI outputs are not on a single GPU. The point is that when DreamScene/DeskScapes sees multiple cards, it won't work.
Are there any plans to change this in the future?
Reply #2 Saturday, March 21, 2009 5:13 AM
Goo, Vista can't span. For exampe, on my home office machine, running non-SLI with two cards, my primary card drives two monitors, so the Dream plays on monitor 1 and then appears to be quick-scaled (jaggies are visible) to play as a clone on monitor 2. Monitor 3 is on a second display adapter and never ever shows dreams.
The Matrox products you mention would give you a spanning capability but they are such abysmally low resolution (1280x1024 per monitor) that it'd really not useful for anything except games.
Vista doesn't have the hardware accelerated failings across multiple monitors that XP does. I've played multiple hardware accelerated HD1080p video on multiple monitors under Vista. It is very nice. 
Reply #3 Saturday, March 21, 2009 12:38 PM
I have a 9800GX2 (which is two GPUs on one PCB) and a 7900GTX. The 9800GX2 is in SLI mode all the time, so only drives a single display. I'd use it for two but SLI multimonitor only works on DVI port 1 and HDMI, not DVI 1 and DVI 2. The 7900GTX is responsible for two monitors.
Reply #4 Saturday, April 11, 2009 2:38 PM
Running Vista64 and a single 9800gx2, hooked to 2x 24" monitors. As soon as I enable second monitor Dreams stops working. Is there a work around to fix this?
Reply #5 Saturday, April 11, 2009 5:41 PM
Goo's post broke this thread in IE8 but it works in FireFox.
My son has a triplehead2go and it's pretty cool. Not sure of the exact resolution he runs but dreams look great across the 3 monitors. I created the Squigly Dreams for his set up.
(Edit: note to self...always look at the date of the original post before replying to a thread.)
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Reply #1 Saturday, March 21, 2009 1:53 AM
Ok, so you see the dreams in sli mode but when not in sli mode you can't see the dream? how many monitor are you running? are you trying to get the dream to span monitors? what is your set up like from what you are saying you have 3 cards (2x9800, 1x7900)
dreams will not span across multiple monitors. i also run a multiple monitor, multiple graphic card system and have same issues. having video span multiple monitors will need to have the assistance of hardware or possibly software and would take a whole toll on the system. there is a device from matrox that helps with this. it's called a dualhead2go and the triplehead2go, they are rather expensive but will help with monitor spanning.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/